


we know how the light works

by jencat



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Lots of Angst, and it's going somewhere, because i'm still mad about that ending several months later apparently, but it's the good angst, in a general sense?, karen dealing with two seasons of being treated like crap by the writers, karen page & dinah madani friendship, post s-2, post season trauma processing, shameless use of jane austen's persuasion as a metaphor, this fic is not going to be a happy place for a while
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2020-08-13 07:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20170225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jencat/pseuds/jencat
Summary: She doesn't quite know what to do with herself, this time. Last time there had been radio silence, but also something of an end point; a resolution. She had wanted answers and she had gone digging for them, and she was equipped to go digging for them; expected to. And she had found enough to come back to where he was again; to have a conversation that wasn't punctuated by gunfire and explosions and car wrecks. And it had worked, for a while.This time he's in the city - she knows that in her bones, without even thinking; he's here and it's salt in that particular wound - and he's here and yet he's gone, almost entirely. She doesn't know how to deal with that part.Karen sifts through some emotional wreckage. Dinah leaves. And Frank is nowhere to be found, for a while.





	1. this is not a swan song

**Author's Note:**

> Oh wow TPs2 made me nearly as ragingly angry as DDs3 did, so as usual I wrote a couple of thousand words of a thing as therapy, and then left it sitting on my laptop glaring at me for a few months. I have a ~lot~ of ideas about where it's all going.
> 
> Title is from Dirty Valentine by Richard Siken (finally i have a Siken title quote, mwahaha)
> 
> Shout out to [evil bunny wolf](http://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf) for very kindly reading this through when I was tearing my hair out a few months back :-)

_I didn’t want to see it this way,_

_everything eating everything in the end._

_We know how the light works,_

_we know where the sound is coming from._

_Verse. Chorus. Verse._

_I’m sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious._

Dirty Valentine- Richard Siken

Dinah Madani calls on her way out of the country, like Karen is someone she just says goodbye to, like they're friends.

Karen looks at the number on her phone and apologizes, steps out of the client meeting she's in and answers, because apparently that's exactly what they are, these days.

"So, I'm going to be out of town for a while."

Karen looks out the window, at New York's vague attempt at spring. There are flowers in the office, because it looks professional, and welcoming, but they're sculpted, elegant orchids; not anything she has a hand in.

"Let me guess, somewhere hot and sunny and dusty, huh?"

"Yep, something like that. It'll be fun."

"Well, it'll certainly be something." She wonders how Dinah will really fare, in an environment with fewer restrictions; more opportunities for legalized chaos, and she bites back a sigh."Let me know when you're next in town, okay?"

Although their semi-regular coffees have dwindled of late, there was a fair amount of sitting drinking scotch together, after everything had been... resolved. She thinks she's going to miss the lack of pretense that came with that. Nelson, Murdock & Page is a place of odd silences and unspoken agreements not to ask, and she's grateful for it and it gnaws at her all at once.

"Absolutely. Let me know if anything.. if anything comes up while I'm gone. If you need anything. And, uh-- if you speak to Curtis, say goodbye for me?"

Karen takes the briefest moment to wonder what that's all about - the group chat they used for a while, after, has been quieter over the last couple of months but none of them have exactly been difficult to find. It's more that there was something of a limit to the amount of conversations that can be had about the last time they all flouted a few dozen federal laws. 

"I'm not sure I'm his favorite person to hear from, but... sure. You take care, okay?" She feels like she keeps letting people spiral away from her; people who aren't all that careful about looking after themselves to begin with. And she remembers Dinah Madani, taking the time to dig out a pair of battered loafers from the trunk of her car before she went chasing after an ambulance.

Dinah laughs, like the concept isn't even worth talking about. "Be safe, Karen. I don't want your name coming up on any lists when I get back."

* * *

She doesn't quite know what to do with herself, this time. Last time there had been radio silence, but also something of an end point; a resolution. She had wanted answers and she had gone digging for them, and she was _equipped_ to go digging for them; expected to. And she had found enough to come back to where he was again; to have a conversation that wasn't punctuated by gunfire and explosions and car wrecks. And it had _worked_, for a while.

This time he's in the city - she knows that in her bones, without even thinking; he's here and it's salt in that particular wound - and he's here and yet he's gone, almost entirely. She doesn't know how to deal with that part.

And that's the thing: she knew what to do before. He disappears, and she knew what you were _meant_ to do.

You were meant to wait until they show up on breaking news, being hospitalized and arrested, again, and then you show up and bullshit your way through the police guard to sit at their bedside and _be there_, and be the first thing they see when they wake up, lost in nightmares and recriminations and grief.

And you hold their hand, and tell them you're not going anywhere, and that should be it, that should be enough. It's a lie you tell yourself all the time, and it shouldn't get this worn and threadbare.

And you realize, again - this is not something new - that you're not the only one corralled into this situation. That you have allies in this, and you all want a resolution, and none of you want the resolution you get.

And you go trade the bodies of more dead women - these dead women you somehow always avoid being part of - for more information, to trade for a dead man's life.

Except he doesn't really want that life, as it turns out.

You try all the things that never worked before, the threats and the challenges and the stating the blindingly obvious - except they _almost_ work, this time, there's enough on the line that he's lurching after you even as he shouldn't even really be standing there, still blindly tethered by something neither of you ever had a name for, not really - and there's still no name for it now.

The words are lacking, and the moment is broken, and he's _gone again_, in the wind and lost and staggering off to something else. To _be_ something else.

You trade your shoes, and your dignity, and you walk out of a hospital barefoot with alarms blaring and some more federal laws bent out of shape, and that cold, weary certainty that something has broken now and--

And, well, she's still a little pissed about the shoes, to be honest.

* * *

And deep down she thinks that maybe it's just that he's family, now, and this is just how family is, for her: going to extraordinary lengths for people who can't bear to be around her.

* * *

She dreams, just once, like her subconscious is trying to spare her. They're standing somewhere she doesn't recognize, but feels familiar: the shore of a lake, mountains arrayed round them. She feels homesick, for the trappings of home; not home itself. She's thinking... she's thinking,_ it's a nostalgia for something that never really existed, there's a word for that._

And he looks good, like she's barely seen him before; unbruised, standing like he's not in pain. He just says, kindly, "You gotta let go, Karen."

\--which is not the same thing at all as _get away from me_, or _I don't want you here_\--

And it's gone, and she wakes up heaving with the kind of ugly sobs she's so careful to avoid giving into these days. The kind of crying that stops you breathing, stops you feeling anything but the next gasped breath wrenching through you--

When it stops, she lays there for a while, getting her heart rate down, getting her breath back. And she keeps thinking about a line from somewhere, stuck in her head - something about holding on-- about _existence and hope being gone?_

It takes about ten seconds to look it up when she finally reaches for her phone; and she’s dragging herself out of bed to go pick through that shelf where she keeps all the books that ever clawed at her heart once.

She thumbs through _Persuasion_, leaning back on the arm of the couch - it’s not the lines everyone remembers; not the letter everyone quotes-- 

It’s what’s being said while those lines are written--

She reads and re-reads the paragraph; a few lines at the end of a longer discussion, and her attention snags on the phrase she keeps remembering; that right now it feels like it’s talking about pointless loyalty to lost causes--

And she lobs the copy across the room, because she's damned if she's going to be told how she's feeling by a woman who's been dead the last two hundred years.

But she gets up, and retrieves the battered paperback after a while, smooths down the latest crease in the cover. Because it's also a book that makes her remember what it was like to be a put-upon sister, and the daughter of an unreliable father who fritters money away, and living in the loss of a mother and not knowing where to turn.

And waiting. It makes her remember how much she can take while she waits for things to get better.

But then, there’s the difference between_ patience,_ and between letting a situation drift into something interminable and unendurable just because you lack the courage or opportunity to fix things.

Karen thinks she’s never been one to be easily persuaded, after all that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karen and Dinah go drinking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first anniversary of season two is swiftly approaching, and I am unsurprisingly still bitter, so here's another chapter of rage fic :)

"At least," Dinah takes another shot. It's been an entire month since everything happened, and they are not being elegant this evening. "At _least_ he didn't shoot you in the head."

They're sitting drinking in a nice enough hotel bar; it's neutral ground and just expensive enough for Dinah's taste. There's a routine down now: one shot to start with, before anyone says anything. It could be anything; it doesn't matter. It's just there to mark a starting point.

Karen picks up her glass; feels half a mouthful of half-decent vodka burn all the way down. "Oh we're going there again, are we?"

"Oh yup. Still working through that one."

Karen downs the rest of the shot; remembers vodka tastes like frat parties and regrets and thinks she's had enough already. "So his actually being dead this time isn't helping so much, I take it?"

She watches Dinah's expression flicker to something wild-eyed for the barest moment. "_His_ being dead. _Her_ still somehow _not_ being dead. Yeah, I'm going to be toasting to that for quite a while."

"_Do_ you wish she was dead?" Karen hears her own voice at a slight remove over the quiet roar of the bar around them, and watches Dinah grin, feral and predatory.

"Fuck knows. I do get to go back and remind her this way, though. That can be fun. D'you wish _he_ was dead?"

Karen chokes on her vodka. "Do I— _Jesus Christ,_ what kind of a question is that?" She takes a breath, and it burns all the way in. "Also you really need to stop with the hospital visits. It just looks kind of shitty at this point."

Dinah looks at her, once, appraisingly. Signals the bartender with some precise, confident twist of her fingers for another round-- and Karen thinks again how Dinah _belongs_ here, drinking expensive liquor, and Karen is masquerading, as always, as someone who belongs somewhere; anywhere at all

Two tumblers of scotch appear on the bar, and she watches Dinah down one in a couple of ferocious mouthfuls.

"The hospital visits, Karen, are a _choice,"_ She enunciates the words slowly; precisely; her voice a little hoarse now, "That... psychotic _bitch__—_"

_"Krista,"_ Karen interjects, helpfully, with some inkling about naming names and humanising hostages. Dinah makes a face.

Karen suddenly remembers that everyone who ever held her hostage knew _exactly_ who she was. That may have kind of been the problem in the first place.

Dinah takes a sip of the second scotch, pushes it back over to her. _"_That... _therapist, in a professional capacity, _poked around in my head. And fucked my psycho ex, and _then_ she tried to kill me. _She_ did not make the right _choice._ And I am choosing to remind her of that, at regular intervals. In a professional capacity."

Karen reaches for her scotch; takes a sharp breath and shakes her head. "You're gloating, in a professional capacity. It still looks shitty. And why the fuck would you ask me if I wished he was dead?"

Another two glasses of scotch appear. Dinah picks one up and taps it against the glass Karen is still clutching. "Because. Because it would mean you could stop trying to save him. Because it would finally draw a line under things that need a line drawn under them. Because it wouldn't be preying on your mind all the time, that he could survive all that and still turn his back on everyone who _helped_ him survive it, only to go... murder people again. Because it would make him less broken; more forgivable, being gone. What did you think I meant?"

Karen says, "_Fuck,"_ once; emphatically, and drains the rest of the scotch. It tastes like deadlines and late nights and blank pages, and she chokes back something like a sob.

"I _think_ he's still gone. And I think he's had a traumatic brain injury since the day I met him, shooting up a hospital with a sawn-off. That hasn't changed. I think I've done everything I ever could to protect from the consequences because it was always worth it, despite everything else. We all did. But I think he still doesn't know how to live in the world like this, and I couldn't seem to help him with that. You can't keep setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm— I mean, you _can_, but all anyone really ends up with are third degree burns and a whole lot of scars."

Karen stops talking and sets the glass down with a clatter. Her skin feels too tight. There's something burning at the back of her throat; behind her eyes. She keeps trying to slow her breathing down, but she's still gasping, slightly. "I'm not doing this, okay? _We're_ not doing this. I'm not sitting here crying into my drink about something that never happened; about someone who was never even really here. I'm not that."

She _is _that, though. That's always been the problem. She holds on to long and too hard. She bankrupted herself paying Matt's rent for months on end. She sinks her teeth into things that could well do without the teeth marks, and then she holds on like a fucking pitbull, because she's terrified of what might happen if she lets go.

And there's the real irony: she knows it's holding on too hard that does all this damage. That got her co-workers killed, that time before. Has gotten so many other people killed, or hurt, and Karen's only real hurt is that she understands she has been the cause of all of it, deep down; has to remember it, and live with it. Even Dinah has that knot of scar tissue somewhere under her curls to show for a similar tenacity; and sometimes Karen thinks she keeps drinking with her so that she can remember not to let her stubbornness warp into that same unsettling tendency to fixation Dinah is prone to, now.

If only— and she knows, that way lies madness, playing this game, _but__— __If only_ Frank hadn't executed Dinah's translator friend, back there in the desert. If only he hadn't followed orders, that one time. He's always been shit at doing what he's told ever since, but she still sees that one choice, that chance, that one decision, that one bullet to the head of a man who did not deserve any of the awful death he got—

She sees it as the start of something spiralling out, still spiralling now.

Dinah Madani is looking at her again; all the wildness gone from her eyes now. Almost sympathetic. Almost smiling, though it wouldn't be a pleasant smile.

"You know, Karen, it's not even about that. It's not _him,_ as a person. He just has this effect on people, doesn't he? Frank _fucking _Castle is—" Karen flinches, a little, at his name, and Dinah pauses, just for a second. "He's a— a line in the sand; a symbol of all the choices you don't make. And having to deal with him – it makes you face up to what you believe in; what lines you're willing to cross. What responsibility you're willing to abdicate. What you're willing to tolerate in the name of something greater."

Karen blinks at her for a long moment before she sighs, and pushes her glass away. Something somewhere in Dinah Madani's little speech there has set a fine tremor in her hands, and she lays them flat on the surface of the bar, watches her fingers tremble ever so slightly. "Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Dinah. We really need to stop drinking."

Dinah slides the glass back in front of her. "Nope. Nuh-huh. What we need to do is _keep_ drinking. At least until it all makes more sense."

* * *

They keep drinking. It never makes more sense.

Six weeks later, Dinah Madani calls on her way out of the country, and Karen understands, at last, what it was she could tolerate in the name of some greater thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dithered over Dinah's dialogue in this a whole lot, because it feels ever so slightly ridiculous. Having said that, the show got so equally ridiculous during the events they're discussing that I just decided to... lean into it?

**Author's Note:**

> The Austen line in full (although the whole scene in the book is pure gold angst and I love it): “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!” 
> 
> the word Karen is trying to remember in her dream is 'hiraeth'
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://www.tumblr.com/blog/it-may-be-dull-but-im-determined)


End file.
